The CBB

And English - at least, US English - distinguishes [ɾ] and /ɹ/. The former isn't conventionally considered phonemic yet, but its a very well-established allophone.

I don't know about the maths, but when I see a calendar witha 6,000-year cycle, my first thought is that human empires tend to last 100-300 years at a time. Languages, religions, civilisations, technologies... nothing in the human world lasts 6,000 years. So who is faithfully following these rules f...

Oh, what the hell. I don't expect this to be a popular thread because, fair warning, Wenthish is a boring European language. And, to be honest, I don’t know exactly how much time I’ll have, particularly starting next week, and it’s really hard to translate into Old Wenthish (I don’t know how you al...

I think you're wrong about rock music, actually - popular song lyrics in any genre tend to be very heavy both on identical rhyme (repeating an entire word or phrase as a rhyme) and on (particularly in rap, I think?) consonant-based rhymes. Much more so than in non-sung poetry. Songs in English gener...

I've actually done quite a lot of thinking about this topic, so I'll just leave my two cents on the table: In English, we actually can't rhyme most of our inflectional endings. Yes, we can! Firstly, off the top of my head we only really have two inflectional endings, -s, and -ed (/-t), both of whic...

This just seems like a pitch-accent system to me - each word has a specific word contour, which can be defined as a tone allocated to a single stressed syllable. If every word has one syllable with the vowel pronounced longer than the rest, incidentally, we call this "stress", rather than ...

I'd add a couple of things: - it's not certain that the big changes took place between the 4th and 6th centuries. Around this time there was a shift from writing in ogham to writing in the latin script, which necessarily required a total respelling of everything. If you add together the big coincide...

*sighs deeply* This would be perfect for Rawàng Ata - a simple but very non-European language - but it's in a bit of flux, and more importantly I don't currently have access to my documents for its most recent stable version. And I don't have the brainpower or time at the moment to recreate them. I ...

I'd suggest looking past the labels ("vowel harmony"), and thinking about what actually happens. What actually happens to create harmony is simple: features from one phoneme spread into nearby phonemes. In the case of vowel harmony, features of one vowel spread across into some or all of t...

I guess that from a 'semantic' point of view, you could look at logical operators. In particular, if you consider the operation of implication in different logics, and the inverses ('given that', etc), it'll give you possibilities. It's probably more useful to think about pragmatics, though - about ...

Any recommendations for what TV series to watch? Some guidelines: - I like Serious Prestige Dramas (The Americans, The Wire, Halt and Catch Fire, Better Call Saul, etc), but I perhaps even more like good, clever, enjoyable shows that aren't so ponderous and heavy (Fringe, The Boys, Teenage Bounty Hu...

A few questions about Measure Words: Can a language without measure words borrow a limited amount of MWs wholesale, instead of developing its own MWs from its own vocabulary? I don't see why that wouldn't be possible? lots of measure-y words in English are loanwords, from words for small quantities...

Specifically, the way you can tell if something is only an allophone or actually a distinct phoneme is, usually, through a so-called "minimal pair" test. If your language contains two words with different meanings that are exactly the same in pronunciation EXCEPT that one has [ɣ] and one h...

[ɣ] ─ or, as you're describing, possibly something like [ɣʲ] or [ɣ͡ʝ]? I'm not a phoneticist ─ is not a phoneme, but it is a phone that occurs, and an allophone of /xʼ/. So it depends whether you want to have a chart of your phonemes or of all of the phones that occur in the language. I'd recommend...

:lat: Latin NUNC "now" :esp: Spanish nunca "never" < NUMQUAM It's nunc or nunca ... Venī strictē mē tentum :wat: Google Translate suggests that this is Latvian? Goes to show how much it knows; I am sure it is Latin. Yet is this a pun of some sort that I am not getting? I have lo...

ETAONRISHDLFCMUGYPWBVKJXQZ Traditionally, it's considered to be ETAOIN SHRDLU CMFWY PVBG KQJXZ (the letters of a linotype keyboard). Wikipedia also gives the orders (putting the trad version next to them for easier comparison): ETAOIN SHRDLU CMFWY PVBG KQJXZ (trad) ETAOIN SRHDLU CMFYW GPBV KXQJZ ET...

Using a word gen, having troubles deciding what order of frequency my phonemes should be in. Learned that phoneme distributions tend to follow a Yule-Simon distribution pattern. So I have a bunch of questions whose answers i think will give me insight on what to do: 1) Would sonorants/resonants be ...

That's not a fallacy, though. That's all totally logical. It leaves one premise (the reason to not want something to happen in a certain place) unexpressed, but the argument itself is logical. Premise 1: some people don't like it when other people kiss in public [kind of implied by the very fact of ...

I tend to slightly overcook everything - due to a combination of laziness, poor timekeeping, and paranoia (it's better to slightly overcook and be disappointed than undercook and be vomiting!) - and unfortunately quinoa does not respond well to being overcooked. But properly-cooked quinoa bought fro...

This seems rather over-egged. Playing a noise game - which you can do with a cat or a dog - is not the same as having a conversation. Even if whales can speak, they wouldn't necessarily use speech when playing a turn-taking noise game. I don't have any resources off-hand but you can search for them ...